It is time authorities stopped complaining about the lack of policing in the city, or bad police service, and invest accordingly to strengthen the daily police service.
That was from the NCD Metropolitan Superintendent Perou N’Dranou during the NCD Law and Order Summit.
The police service needs to be revolutionised now, and procrastinating this will only make policing in the National Capital District worse, says N’Dranou.
No fuel in vehicles for officers to carry out policing duties has become a norm in NCD.
“Last week we had four days of no fuel. As we speak today, two police stations have no vehicles, yet they (officers) come to work getting on PMVs.
“I call on relevant authorities to do the right thing. Those are the basic things that would lead to the lack of police service. While we can talk about big things, my view is let’s get this basic fundamental things right then we can build up the policing system in the country.”
One approach in cleaning up the police force in NCD is the Policing the Police initiative that was launched in October.
“From my report two weeks ago, we have arrested 61 officers,” stated the chief superintendent.
A lot of resources had to be pulled to this initiative.
“What if we give the same support to all other 15 units? That’s only one of the 15 performing, that is our challenge.”
In terms of policing, the Met Sup revealed that in the first six months of 2019, a total of 6,609 summary offence were reported. Of those 1,981 arrests were made.
The report figures passed the 2018 Statistics. In 2018, there were 4,126 major crimes reported while summary offence topped the number of crimes reported with 4,631.
But a more alarming figure was the number of sexual crimes reported – 390 with an average of 33 sexual crimes per month.
Stolen motor vehicle accidents stood at 534 incidents; an average of 55 per month and one vehicle stolen per day in the National Capital District.